16 Module 5: Civil Rights And Public Policy
Objectives
- Differentiate the Supreme Court’s three standards of review for classifying people under the equal protection clause.
- Trace the evolution of protections of the rights of African Americans and explain the application of nondiscrimination principles to issues of race.
- Relate civil rights principles to progress made by other ethnic groups in the United States.
- Trace the evolution of women’s rights and explain how civil rights principles apply to gender issues.
- Show how civil rights principles have been applied to seniors, people with disabilities, and gays and lesbians.
- Trace the evolution of affirmative action policy and assess the arguments for and against it.
- Establish how civil rights policy advances democracy and increases the scope of government.
Read
Chapter Summary
When the value of equality conflicts with the value of liberty—when individuals in privileged positions are challenged to give them up—citizens often look to the government to resolve the issue. This chapter examines what the Constitution says about equality and how constitutional rights to equality have been interpreted. It also reviews the development of civil rights in the United States, highlighting the important role of the court system in expanding equality over the past three decades.
The Struggle for Equality
The real meaning of equality is both elusive and divisive. Most Americans favor equality in the abstract, but the concrete struggle for equal rights has been our nation’s most bitter battle. The rallying call for groups demanding more equality has been civil rights, which are policies that extend basic rights to groups historically subject to discrimination. Philosophically, the struggle for equality involves defining the term; constitutionally, it involves interpreting laws; politically, it often involves power.
American society does not emphasize equal results or equal rewards. A belief in equal rights has often led to a belief in equality of opportunity. Today’s debates over inequality in America center on racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and discrimination based on factors such as age, disability, and sexual preference.
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention came up with a plan for government rather than guarantees of individual rights, and the word equality does not even appear in the original Constitution. The only place in which the idea of equality clearly appears in the Constitution is in the 14th Amendment, which prohibits the states from denying “equal protection of the laws” to any person. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the 14th Amendment was used to assure rights for disadvantaged groups, but the equal protection clause gradually became the vehicle for more expansive constitutional interpretations.
The Court has developed three levels of judicial scrutiny (or classifications). Most classifications that are reasonable (that bear a rational relationshi